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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 11 2019, @06:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-could-care-less dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Empathy Is Tearing Us Apart

There are people who believe that the political polarization now afflicting the United States might finally start to subside if Americans of both parties could somehow become more empathetic. If you're one of these people, the American Political Science Review has sobering news for you.

Last week APSR—one of the alpha journals in political science—published a study[$] which found that "empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in the electorate and in some respects even exacerbates it."

The study had two parts. In the first part, Americans who scored high on an empathy scale showed higher levels of "affective polarization"—defined as the difference between the favorability rating they gave their political party and the rating they gave the opposing party. In the second part, undergraduates were shown a news story about a controversial speaker from the opposing party visiting a college campus. Students who had scored higher on the empathy scale were more likely to applaud efforts to deny the speaker a platform.

It gets worse. These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. That's right: According to this study, people prone to empathy are prone to schadenfreude.

This study is urgently important—though not because it's a paradigm shifter, shedding radically new light on our predicament. As the authors note, their findings are in many ways consistent with conclusions reached by other scholars in recent years. But the view of empathy that's emerging from this growing body of work hasn't much trickled down to the public. And public understanding of it may be critical to shifting America's political polarization into reverse somewhere between here and the abyss.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 11 2019, @09:54PM (4 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday November 11 2019, @09:54PM (#919110) Homepage
    > genuine free market will inevitably lead to a monopoly

    Only if commoditisation is taken to an impossible theoretical extreme (all suppliers' goods are equally available to all consumers, which would be an unstable equilibrium).
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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:53AM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:53AM (#919225) Journal

    Sorry, but that "only" needs justification. I'll grant that only the theoretical case was proven, but the general mechanism appears quite robust. And, in fact, in every existing system that I know of, the leverage wielded by those with more power at the start of examination is used to tilt the balance more in their favor. This has been widely observed previously. The new part of the result was that even fair trades tend to favor those with more access to resources.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:16PM (2 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:16PM (#919359) Homepage
      I'd say that the only way that the only doesn't hold is if you make assumptions that go against the presumption of a perfect free market. It could be that we have a different definition of "monopoly" though. My premises permit dominance, but do not necessarily lead to *exclusive* control, which is what I would want before I were to call the situation a monopoly.
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      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:46PM (#919452) Journal

        What they show is that given reasonable presumptions, dominance develops into monopoly even with fair trades being required (and obeyed). And that normal deviations from fair trades increase the rate at which dominance develops into monopoly, i.e. sole control. And that this holds all the way from a random deviation at the initial state through total dominance.

        Deviations from the model where only some entities have access to certain resources would increase the rate of development of monopolies, but *might* lead to multiple different monopolies. (As far as I know the model didn't address that point, and the requirement that all trades be fair might reasonably lead to that result. Of course, in the real world the requirement that trades be fair doesn't exist, at least not as they defined fair. [Is "Give me all your money and I won't shoot you" a fair trade? If not why not? But they didn't allow coercive trades.])

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        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 12 2019, @08:36PM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday November 12 2019, @08:36PM (#919540) Homepage
          None of that even mentions the geographical effect I mentioned earlier, so I don't consider that argument countered at all. I'd be willing to bet whatever textbooks you got that from probably also overlooked it too, but I'm guessing it was an economics textbook, and therefore something will less marginal utility than the paper it's written on.
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